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He had a good innings. A very good innings. He lived to 92 and was writing right up to the end.

I’m trying to remember the first thing I read by Brian Aldiss. I think it might have been The Billion Year Spree, his encyclopaedia of science fiction. The library in my hometown had a copy when I was growing up, and I was devouring everything SF-related.

Decades later I had the great pleasure of meeting the man. It was 2012 and I was in charge of putting together the line-up for that year’s dConstruct. I had the brilliant Lauren Beukes on the line-up all the way from South Africa and I thought it would be fun to organise some kind of sci-fi author event the evening before. Well, one thing led to another: Rifa introduced me to Tim Aldiss, who passed along a request to his father, who kindly agreed to come to Brighton for the event. Then Brighton-based Jeff Noon came on board. The end result was an hour and a half in the company of three fantastic—and fantastically different—authors.

Brian Aldiss was simply wonderful that evening. He regaled us with the most marvellous stories, at times hilarious, at other times incredibly touching. He was a true gentleman.

I’m so grateful that I’ll always have the memory of that evening. I’m also very grateful that I have so many Brian Aldiss books still to read.

I’ve barely made a dent into the ludicrously prolific output of the man. I’ve read just some of his books:

Non-stop—I’m a sucker for generation starship stories,

Hothouse—ludicrously lush and trippy,

Greybeard—a grim vision of a childless world before Children Of Men,

The Hand-reared Boy—filthy, honest and beautifully written,

Heliconia Spring—a deep-time epic …and I haven’t even read the next two books in the series!

Then there are the short stories. Hundreds of ‘em! Most famously Super-Toys Last All Summer Long—inspiration for the Kubrick/Spielberg A.I. film. It’s one of the most incredibly sad stories I’ve ever read. I find it hard to read it without weeping.

Whenever a great artist dies, it has become a cliché to say that they will live on through their work. In the case of Brian Aldiss and his astounding output, it’s quite literally true. I’m looking forward to many, many years of reading his words.

My sincerest condolences to his son Tim, his partner Alison, and everyone who knew and loved Brian Aldiss.

It’s been a few weeks now since Patterns Day and I’m still buzzing from it. I might be biased, but I think it was a great success all ‘round—for attendees, for speakers, and for us at Clearleft organising the event.

I first had the idea for Patterns Day quite a while back. To turn the idea into reality meant running some numbers. Patterns Day wouldn’t have been possible without Alis. She did all the logistical work—the hard stuff—which freed me up to concentrate on the line-up. I started to think about who I could invite to speak, and at the same time, started looking for a venue.

I knew from the start that I wanted it to be one-day single-track conference in Brighton, much like Responsive Day Out. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use the Corn Exchange again—there’s extensive rebuilding going on there this year. I put together a shortlist of Brighton venues and Alis investigated their capacities and costs, but to be honest, I knew that I wanted to have it in the Duke Of York’s. I love that place, and I knew from attending FFconf that it makes for an excellent conference venue.

The seating capacity of the Duke Of York’s is quite a bit less than the Corn Exchange, so I knew the ticket price would have to be higher than that of Responsive Day Out. The Duke Of York’s isn’t cheap to rent for the day either (but worth every penny).

To calculate the ticket price, I had to figure out the overall costs:

Venue hire,

A/V hire,

Printing costs (for name badges, or in this case, stickers),

Payment provider commission—we use Stripe through the excellent Ti.to,

Speaker’s travel,

Speaker’s accommodation,

Speaker’s dinner the evening before the event,

Speaker’s payment.

Some conference organisers think they can skimp on that last part. Those conference organisers are wrong. A conference is nothing without its speakers. They are literally the reason why people buy tickets.

Because the speakers make or break a conference, there’s a real temptation to play it safe and only book people who are veterans. But then you’re missing out on a chance to boost someone when they’re just starting out with public speaking. I remember taking a chance on Alla a few years back for Responsive Day Out 3—she had never given a conference talk before. She, of course, gave a superb talk. Now she’s speaking at events all over the world, and I have to admit, it gives me a warm glow inside. When it came time for Patterns Day, Alla had migrated into the “safe bet” category—I knew she’d deliver the perfect closing keynote.

I understand why conference organisers feel like they need to play it safe. From their perspective, they’re already taking on a lot of risk in putting on a conference in the first place. It’s easy to think of yourself as being in a position of vulnerability—”If I don’t sell enough tickets, I’m screwed!” But I think it’s important to realise that you’re also in a position of power, whether you like it or not. If you’re in charge of putting together the line-up of a conference, that’s a big responsibility, not just to the attendees on the day, but to the community as a whole. It’s like that quote by Eliel Saarinen:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

The other view would be that there should be 50% woman speakers. Although that sounds great I personally never believed in this argument. It’s based on the general population instead of the population of web developers, and if we’d extend that argument to its logical conclusion then 99.9% of the web development conference speakers should know nothing about web development, since that’s the rough ratio in the general population.

That makes it sound like a conference’s job is to represent the status quo. By that logic, the line-up should include plenty of bad speakers—after all, the majority of web developers aren’t necessarily good speakers. But of course that’s not how conferences work. They don’t represent typical ideas—quite the opposite. What’s the point of having an event that simply reinforces the general consensus? This isn’t Harrison Bergeron. You want a line-up that’s exceptional.

I don’t think conference organisers can shirk this issue and say “It’s out of my hands; I’m just reflecting the way things are.” The whole point of having a conference in the first place is to trigger some kind of change. If you’re not happy with the current make-up of the web community (and I most definitely am not), then a conference is the perfect opportunity to try to demonstrate an alternative. We do it with the subject matter of the talks—”Our code/process/tooling doesn’t have to be this way!”—and I think we should also apply that to the wider context: “Our culture doesn’t have to be this way!”

Passing up that chance isn’t just a missed opportunity, I think it’s also an abdication of responsibility. Believe me, I know that organising a conference is a lot of work, but that’s not a reason to cop out. On the contrary, it’s all the more reason to step up to the plate and try your damnedest to make a difference. Otherwise, why even have a conference?

Whenever the issue of diversity at conferences comes up, there is inevitably someone who says “All I care about is having the best speakers.” But if that were true, shouldn’t your conference (and every other conference) have exactly the same line-up every year?

The truth is that there are all sorts of factors that play into the choice of speakers. I think representation should be a factor, but that’s all it is—one factor of many. Is the subject matter relevant? That’s a factor. Do we already have someone on the line-up covering similar subject matter? That’s a factor. How much will it cost to get this speaker? That’s a factor. Is the speaker travelling from very far away? That’s a factor.

In the case of Patterns Day, I had to factor in the range of topics. I wanted a mixture of big-picture talks as well as hands-on nitty-gritty case studies. I also didn’t want it to be too developer-focused or too design-focused. I was aiming for a good mix of both.

In the end, I must admit that I am guilty of doing exactly what I’ve been railing against. I played it safe. I put together a line-up of speakers that I wanted to see, and that I knew with absolute certainty would deliver great presentations. There were plenty of potential issues for me to get stressed about in the run-up to the event, but the quality of the talks wasn’t one of them. On the one hand, I wish I had taken more chances with the line-up, but honestly, if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Because I was trying to keep the ticket price as low as possible—and the venue hire was already a significant cost—I set myself the constraint of only having speakers from within the UK (Jina was the exception—she was going to come anyway as an attendee, so of course I asked her to speak). Knowing that the speaker’s travel costs would be low, I could plug the numbers into an algebraic formula for figuring out the ticket price:

costs ÷ seats = price

Add up all the costs and divide that total by the number of available seats to get the minimum ticket price.

In practice, you probably don’t want to have to sell absolutely every single ticket just to break even, so you set the price for a sales figure lower than 100%—maybe 80%, or 50% if you’re out to make a tidy profit (although if you’re out to make a tidy profit, I don’t think conferences are the right business to be in—ask any conference organiser).

Some conferences factor in money for sponsorship to make the event happen. I prefer to have sponsors literally sponsoring additions to the conference. In the case of Patterns Day, the coffee and pastries were sponsored by Deliveroo, and the videos were sponsored by Amazon. But sponsorship didn’t affect the pricing formula.

The Duke Of York’s has around 280 seats. I factored in about 30 seats for speakers, Clearlefties, and other staff. That left 250 seats available for attendees. But that’s not the number I plugged into the pricing formula. Instead, I chose to put 210 tickets on sale and figured out the ticket price accordingly.

What happened to the remaining 40 seats? The majority of them went to Codebar students and organisers. So if you bought a ticket for Patterns Day, you directly subsidised the opportunity for people under-represented in technology to attend. Thank you.

Speaking personally, I found that having the Codebar crew in attendance really made my day. They’re my heroes, and it meant the world to me that they were able to be there.

I’ve got that weird post-conference feeling now, where that all-consuming thing that was ahead of you is now behind you, and you’re not quite sure what to do. Although, comparatively speaking, Patterns Day came together pretty quickly. I announced it less than three months ago. It sold out just over a month later. Now it’s over and done with, it feels like a whirlwind.

The day itself was also somewhat whirlwind-like. It was simultaneously packed to the brim with great talks, and yet over in the blink of an eye. Everyone who attended seemed to have a good time, which makes me very happy indeed. Although, as I said on the day, while it’s nice that everyone came along, I put the line-up together for purely selfish reasons—it was my dream line-up of people I wanted to see speak.

Boy, oh boy, did they deliver the goods! Every talk was great. And I must admit, I was pleased with how I had structured the event. The day started and finished with high-level, almost philosophical talks; the mid section was packed with hands-on nitty-gritty practical examples.

Thanks to sponsorship from Amazon UK, Craig was videoing all the talks. I’ll get them online as soon as I can. But in the meantime, Drew got hold of the audio and made mp3s of each talk. They are all available in handy podcast form for your listening and huffduffing pleasure:

I began the day by predicting that Patterns Day would leave us with more questions than answers …but that they would be the right questions. I think that’s pretty much what happened. Quite a few people compared it to the first Responsive Day Out in tone. I remember a wave of relief flowing across the audience when Sarah opened the show by saying:

I think if we were all to be a little more honest when we talk to each other than we are at the moment, the phrase “winging it” would be something that would come up a lot more often. If you actually speak to people, not very many people have a process for this at the moment. Most of us are kind of winging it.

This is hard.

No one knows exactly what they’re doing.

Nobody has figured this out yet.

Those sentiments were true of responsive design in 2013, and they’re certainly true of design systems in 2017. That’s why I think it’s so important that we share our experiences—good and bad—as we struggle to come to grips with these challenges. That’s why I put Patterns Day together. That’s also why, at the end of the day, I thanked everyone who has ever written about, spoken about, or otherwise shared their experience with design systems, pattern libraries, style guides, and components. And of course I made sure that everyone gave Anna a great big round of applause for her years of dedicated service—I wish she could’ve been there.

There were a few more “thank you”s at the end of the day, and all of them were heartfelt. Thank you to Felicity and everyone else at the Duke of York’s for the fantastic venue and making sure everything went so smoothly. Thank you to AVT for all the audio/visual wrangling. Thanks to Amazon for sponsoring the video recordings, and thanks to Deliveroo for sponsoring the tea, coffee, pastries, and popcorn (they’re hiring, by the way). Huge thanks to Alison and everyone from Clearleft who helped out on the day—Hana, James, Rowena, Chris, Benjamin, Seb, Jerlyn, and most especially Alis who worked behind the scenes to make everything go so smoothly. Thanks to Kai for providing copies of Offscreen Magazine for the taking. Thanks to Marc and Drew for taking lots of pictures. Thanks to everyone who came to Patterns Day, especially the students and organisers from Codebar Brighton—you are my heroes.

Most of all thank you, thank you, thank you, to the eight fantastic speakers who made Patterns Day so, so great—I love you all.

Patterns Day is one week from today—Friday, June 30th. I’m really looking forward to seeing you in Brighton.

If you’re arriving by train, the venue is a short walk away from the train station. The Duke Of York’s Picture House is at Preston Circus. You’ll recognise the building by its distinctive pair of artificial can-can legs emerging from the roof.

Registration starts at 9am. Show up with some ID, speak friend, and enter. Patterns Day is going to be a bit different to most conferences. Instead of getting a schwag bag and a name badge on a lanyard, you’re going to get a sticker to slap on yourself. The sticker identifies you as an attendee so please don’t lose it.

Once you’re registered, please help yourself to the free coffee, tea, and pastries. I’ll open up the show shortly before 10am with some introductory remarks, and then we’ll be all set for our first speaker at 10am. Here’s how the schedule is shaping up (but always subject to change):

There’ll be more coffee and tea throughout the day, and maybe a nice bag of popcorn in the afternoon.

We’ll finish up before 5pm, at which point we can collectively retire to a nearby pub to continue our discussions. Or we can head to the seafront to douse our melting brains in the English channel. Let’s play it by ear.

I can’t wait to welcome you to Patterns Day, and I’m positively aquiver with anticipation of the talks we’re going to hear from the fantastic line-up of speakers: Laura, Ellen, Sareh, Rachel, Alice, Jina, Paul, and Alla.

There was a great response to my call for sponsors. Thanks to Amazon Video, we’ll have video recordings of all the talks. Thanks to Deliveroo, we’ll have coffee and tea throughout the day …and pastries in the morning! …and popcorn in the afternoon!!

You’re on your own for lunch. I’ve listed some options on the website, but I should add some more.

I have to say, looking at the schedule for the day, I’m very excited about this line-up. To say I’m looking forward to it would be quite the understatement. I can’t wait!

It didn’t take long for Patterns Day to sell out (in the sense of the tickets all being sold; not in the sense of going mainstream and selling out to The Man).

I’m very pleased about the ticket situation. It certainly makes my life easier. Now I can concentrate on the logistics for the day, without having to worry about trying to flog tickets AKA marketing.

But I also feel bad. Some people who really, really wanted to come weren’t able to get tickets in time. This is usually because they work at a company where to have to get clearance for the time off, and the cost of the ticket. By the time the word came down from on high that they’ve got the green light, the tickets were already gone. That’s a real shame.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. There is one last chance to get tickets for Patterns Day, and that’s through sponsorship.

Here’s the deal: if I can get some things sponsored (like recordings of the talks, tea and coffee for the day, or an after-party), I can offer a few tickets in return. I can also offer your logo on the Patterns Day website, your logo on the slide between talks, and a shout-out on stage. But that’s pretty much it. I can’t offer a physical stand at the event—there just isn’t enough room. And I certainly can’t offer you a list of attendee details for your marketing list—that’s just wrong.

In order of priority, here’s what I would love to get sponsored, and here’s what I can offer in return:

£2000: Sponsoring video recordings of the talks—4 tickets. This is probably the best marketing opportunity for your company; we can slap your logo at the start and end of each video when they go online.

£2000: Sponsoring tea and coffee for attendees for the day—4 tickets. This is a fixed price, set by the venue.

£2000+: Sponsoring an after-party near the conference—4 tickets. Ideally you’d take care of booking a venue for this, and you can go crazy decking it out with your branding. Two pubs right across from the conference venue have upstairs rooms you can book: The Joker, and The Hare And Hounds.

There you have it. There’s no room for negotiation, I’m afraid, but I think they’re pretty good deals. Remember, by sponsoring Patterns Day you’ll also have my undying gratitude, and the goodwill of all my peers coming to this event.

Reckon you can convince your marketing department? Drop me a line, let me know which sponsorship option you’d like to snap up, and those four tickets could be yours.

Ticket sales for Patterns Day are going quite, quite briskly. If you’d like to come along, but you don’t yet have a ticket, you might want to remedy that. Especially when you hear about who else is going to be speaking…

Sareh Heidari works at the BBC building websites for a global audience, in as many as twenty different languages. If you want to know about strategies for using CSS at scale, you definitely want to hear this talk. She just stepped off stage at the excellent CSSconf EU in Berlin, and I’m so happy that Sareh’s coming to Brighton!

Patterns Day isn’t the first conference about design systems and pattern libraries on the web. That honour goes to the Clarity conference, organised by the brilliant Jina Anne. I was gutted I couldn’t make it to Clarity last year. By all accounts, it was excellent. When I started to form the vague idea of putting on an event here in the UK, I immediately contacted Jina to make sure she was okay with it—I didn’t want to step on her toes. Not only was she okay with it, but she really wanted to come along to attend. Well, never mind attending, I said, how about speaking?

It’s going to be a brain-bendingly good day of ideas, case studies, processes, and techniques with something for everyone, whether you’re a designer, developer, product owner, content strategist, or project manager.

Tickets are £150+VAT. Grab yours now. Heck, bring the whole team. Let’s face it, this is a topic that everyone is struggling with so we’re all going to benefit from getting together for a day with your peers to hammer out the challenges of pattern libraries and design systems.

I’m really excited about this! I would love to see you in Brighton on the 30th of June for Patterns Day. It’s going to be fun!

There was a design session looking at alternatives to simply presenting everything in a stream. Some great ideas came out of that. And there was a session all about bookmarking and linking. That one really got my brain whirring with ideas for the second day—the making/coding day.

I’ve learned from previous Indie Web Camps that a good strategy for the second day is to have two tasks to tackle: one that’s really easy (so you’ve at least got that to demo at the end), and one that’s more ambitious. This time, I put together a list of potential goals, and then ordered them by difficulty. By the end of the day, I managed to get a few of them done.

I didn’t get around to adding pagination. That’s something I should definitely add, because some of those pages get veeeeery long. But I did spend some time adding sparklines. They can be quite revealing, especially on topics that were hot ten years ago, but have faded over time, or topics that have becoming more and more popular with each year.

I’m recovering from an illness that laid me low a few weeks back. I had a nasty bout of man-flu which then led to a chest infection for added coughing action. I’m much better now, but alas, this illness meant I had to cancel my trip to Chicago for An Event Apart. I felt very bad about that. Not only was I reneging on a commitment, but I also missed out on an opportunity to revisit a beautiful city. But it was for the best. If I had gone, I would have spent nine hours in an airborne metal tube breathing recycled air, and then stayed in a hotel room with that special kind of air conditioning that hotels have that always seem to give me the sniffles.

Anyway, no point regretting a trip that didn’t happen—time to look forward to my next trip. I’m about to embark on a little mini tour of some lovely European cities:

Tomorrow I travel to Stockholm for Nordic.js. I’ve never been to Stockholm. In fact I’ve only stepped foot in Sweden on a day trip to Malmö to hang out with Emil. I’m looking forward to exploring all that Stockholm has to offer.

On Saturday I’ll go straight from Stockholm to Berlin for the View Source event organised by Mozilla. Looks like I’ll be staying in the east, which isn’t a part of the city I’m familiar with. Should be fun.

Alas, I’ll have to miss out on the final day of View Source, but with good reason. I’ll be heading from Berlin to Bologna for the excellent From The Front conference. Ah, I remember being at the very first one five years ago! I’ve made it back every second year since—I don’t need much of an excuse to go to Bologna, one of my favourite places …mostly because of the food.

The only downside to leaving town for this whirlwind tour is that there won’t be a Brighton Homebrew Website Club tomorrow. I feel bad about that—I had to cancel the one two weeks ago because I was too sick for it.

But on the plus side, when I get back, it won’t be long until Indie Web Camp Brighton on Saturday, September 24th and Sunday, September 25th. If you haven’t been to an Indie Web Camp before, you should really come along—it’s for anyone who has their own website, or wants to have their own website. If you have been to an Indie Web Camp before, you don’t need me to convince you to come along; you already know how good it is.

The importance of owning your data is getting more awareness. To grow it and help people get started, we’re meeting for a bar-camp like collaboration in Brighton for two days of brainstorming, working, teaching, and helping.

If you haven’t been to an Indie Web Camp before, it’s a very straightforward proposition. The idea is that you should have your own website. That’s it. Every thing else is predicated on that. So while there’ll be plenty of discussions, demos, and designs, they’re all in service to that fundamental premise.

The first day of an Indie Web Camp is like a BarCamp. We make a schedule grid at the start of the day and people organise topics by room and time slot. It sounds chaotic. It is chaotic. But it works surprisingly well. The discussions can be about technologies, or interfaces, or ideas, or just about anything really.

The second day is for making. After the discussions from the previous day, most people will have a clear idea at this point for something they might want to do. It might involve adding some new technology to their website, or making some design changes, or helping build a tool. For people starting from scratch, this is the perfect time for them to build and launch a basic website.

At the end of the second day, everyone demos what they’ve done. I’m always amazed by how much people can accomplish in just one weekend. There’s something about having other people around to help you that makes it super productive.

You might be thinking “but I’m not a coder!” Don’t worry—there’ll be plenty of coders there so you can get their help on whatever you might decide to do. If you’re a designer, your skills will be in high demand by those coders. It’s that mish-mash of people that makes it such a fun gathering.

I’m about to have a crazy few days that will see me bouncing between Brighton and Amsterdam.

It starts tomorrow. I’m flying to Amsterdam in the morning and speaking at this Icons event in the afternoon about digital preservation and long-term thinking.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be opening up the inaugural HTML Special which is a new addition the CSS Day conference. Each talk on Thursday will cover one HTML element. I am honoured to speaking about the A element. Here’s the talk description:

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…

Enquire within upon everything.

I’ve been working all out to get this talk done and I finally wrapped it up today. Right now, I feel pretty happy with it, but I bet I’ll change that opinion in the next 48 hours. I’m pretty sure that this will be one of those talks that people will either love or hate, kind of like my 2008 dConstruct talk, The System Of The World.

After CSS Day, I’ll be heading back to Brighton on Saturday, June 18th to play a Salter Cane gig in The Greys pub. If you’re around, you should definitely come along—not only is it free, but there will be some excellent support courtesy of Jon London, and Lucas and King.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be speaking at DrupalCamp Brighton, opening up day two of the event. I won’t be able to stick around long afterwards though, because I need to skidaddle to the airport to go back to Amsterdam!

Google are having their Progressive Web App Dev Summit there on Monday on Tuesday. I’ll be moderating a panel on the second day, so I’ll need to pay close attention to all the talks. I’ll be grilling representatives from Google, Samsung, Opera, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Considering my recent rants about some very bad decisions on the part of Google’s Chrome team, it’s very brave of them to ask me to be there, much less moderate a panel in public.

Got a burning question for browser/device makers? Write it down, post it somewhere on the web with a link back to this post, and then send me a web mention (there’s a form for you to paste in the URL at the bottom of this post).

That’s right! You can simply pop in at any time and test your websites on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Kindles, and more.

The address is 68 Middle Street. Ring the “Clearleft” buzzer and say you’re there to use the device lab.. There’ll always be somebody in the office. They’ll buzz you in and you can take the lift to the first floor. No need to make a prior appointment—feel free to swing by whenever you like.

There is no catch. You show up, test your sites on whatever devices you want, and maybe even stick around for a cup of tea.

Tell your friends.

I was doing a little testing this morning, helping Charlotte with a pesky bug that was cropping up on an iPad running iOS 8. To get the bottom of the issue, I needed to be able to inspect the DOM on the iPad. That turns out to be fairly straightforward (as of iOS 6):

Plug the device into a USB port on your laptop using a lightning cable.

Open Safari on the device and navigate to the page you want to test.

Open Safari on your laptop.

From the “Develop” menu in your laptop’s Safari, select the device.

Use the web inspector on your laptop’s Safari to inspect elements to your heart’s content.

It’s a similar flow for Android devices:

Plug the device into a USB port on your laptop.

Open Chrome on the device and navigate to the page you want to test.

Open Chrome on your laptop.

Type chrome://inspect into the URL bar of Chrome on your laptop.

Select the device.

On the device, grant permission (a dialogue will have appeared by now).

FF Conf and Ampersand were both superb. Despite having very different subject matter, the two events have a lot in common. They’re both affordable, one-day, single-track, focused gatherings.

Both events really benefit from having a mastermind overseeing the line-up: Remy in the case of FF Conf, and Richard in the case of Ampersand. That really paid off. Both events were superbly curated, with a diverse mix of speakers and topics.

It was really interesting to see both conferences break out of the boundary of what happens inside web browsers. At FF Conf, we were treated to talks on linguistics and inclusivity. At Ampersand, we enjoyed talks on physiology and culture. But of course we also had the really deep dives into the minutest details of JavaScript, SVG, typography, and layout.

Videos will be available from FF Conf, and audio will be available from Ampersand. Be sure to check them out once they’re released.

I’ve been tasked with writing a profile of you from my tech editor at Fortune, a business magazine in the U.S.

I’m headed to Brighton this weekend and hoping we can meet up. Can you call me at +X XXX XXX XXX as soon as you can? Thanks. I’ll try you on your mobile in a few minutes.

Sounded urgent! “I’d better call him straight away”, I thought. So I did just that. It went to voicemail. The voicemail inbox was full. I couldn’t leave a message.

So I sent him an email and eventually we managed to have a phone conversation together. Richard—for that is his name—told me about the article he wanted to write about the “scene” in Brighton. He asked if there was anyone else I thought he should speak to. I was more than happy to put him in touch with Rosa and Dot, Jacqueline, Jonathan, and other lovely people behind Brighton institutions like Codebar, Curiosity Hub, and The Skiff. We also arranged to meet up when he came to town.

The day of Richard’s visit rolled around and I spent the afternoon showing him around town and chatting. He seemed somewhat distracted but occasionally jotted down notes in response to something I said.

The resultant article is online now. It’s interesting to see which of my remarks were used in the end …and the way that what looks like direct quotes are actually nothing of the kind. Still, that’s way that journalism tends to work—far more of a subjective opinionated approach than simply objectively documenting.

The article focuses a lot on San Francisco, and Richard’s opinions of the scene there. It makes for an interesting read, but it’s a little weird to see quotes attributed to me interspersed amongst a strongly-worded criticism of a city I don’t live in.

Still, the final result is a good read. And I really, really like the liberal sprinkling of hyperlinks throughout—more of this kind of thing in online articles, please!

There is one hyperlink omission though. It’s in this passage where Richard describes what I’m eating as we chatted:

“But here’s the thing I love about this town,” said Keith, in between bites of a sweet corn fritter, at the festival’s launch party this year. “It cares as much about art and education as about tech and commerce.”

Rosa and Dot are Ruby programmers. They’ve poured an incredible amount of energy into making the Brighton chapter of Codebar such a successful project. They’ve built up a wonderful, welcoming event where everyone is welcome. Whenever I’ve participated as a coach, I’ve always found it be an immensely rewarding experience. For that, and for everything else they’ve accomplished, I thank them.

I popped along to the opening of Georgina’s Familiars exhibition. It’s really good. There’s an accompanying event on Saturday evening called Unfamiliar Matter which looks like it’ll be great. That’s the same night as the Miniclick party though.

But of course the big event is dConstruct tomorrow. I’m really excited about it. Partly that’s because I’m not the one organising it—it’s all down to Andy and Kate—but also because the theme and the line-up is right up my alley.

Andy has asked me to compere the event. I feel a little weird about that seeing as it’s his baby, but I’m also honoured. And, you know, after talking to most of the speakers for the podcast—which I enjoyed immensely—I feel like I can give an informed introduction for each talk.

I really enjoyed the most recent Indie Web Camp in Brighton. Some of us were discussing at the event how it’s a shame that it only happens once or twice year, considering how much everyone manages to accomplish at each one.

Well, to help keep the momentum going, Charlotte and I are going to start running a Homebrew Website Club meetup here in Brighton. It’ll take place every second Wednesday in the auditorium—or, if that’s not available, the Clearleft office—here at 68 Middle Street from 6:30pm to 7:30pm (although myself and Charlotte will be there from 6pm so feel free to show up early).

There’s no set agenda to these meetups. Simply put, it’s a chance to work on your personal site or side project while in the company of either people doing the same thing. We can help each other out, or just have a chance to chat and compare notes, very much in the spirit of the original Homebrew Computer Club …but applied to your own website.

The first Brighton Homebrew Website Club meetup is on Wednesday, August 12th. It would be lovely to see you there.

Thanks to Craig and Amie from Five Simple Steps for coming to Brighton to record the videos—really appreciate it. And thanks to Shopify for sponsoring the videos; covering the cost of the videos meant that we could keep the ticket price low.